Many efforts are made to reduce the cost of phone calls.
One way to reduce costs is through the use of calling cards. These do however require quite a lot of user input. U.S. Pat. No. 7,346,156 describes one way in which the user input can be reduced. This is done through detecting an identity of a caller, receiving an assigned incoming telephone number, identifying a recipient associated with the assigned incoming telephone number and the identity and connecting the caller and the recipient. There is in this regard still a lot of effort required due to the fact that calling cards are used.
With regard to cellular phones another way to reduce costs is through associating the cellular phone with a communication handling device, such as a private branch exchange of a company, and thereafter using call-back to connect to other entities.
A system having this purpose is for instance described in EP 1847104. Here a connection is set up via a call back procedure. According to this document a data message is sent from the cellular phone to a call setup device, which orders a communication handling device in the form of a private branch exchange to set up one connection to the mobile phone and another connection to an entity the user of the phone wants to call. These connections are then interconnected in the private branch exchange.
In this way it is then possible for the user to make calls, without the cellular phone being billed or being billed only for the data traffic, which is in some cases negligible.
There may be several reasons for the cellular phone not being desired to be billed, where one may be that the phone is the private property of the user, which user is employed by a company. The costs of the call, which may be a business call, should then be borne by the company and not the user. This is often automatically done if a private branch exchange of the company is used for the call-set up.
However, there are situations where also small amounts of data traffic are fairly expensive. This is typically the case when the cellular phone is roaming in another network than the one to which it belongs, for instance when being used abroad.
There is therefore a need for an alternative call-back scheme that does not have to rely on data traffic for initiating the call-back procedure.
The invention is therefore directed towards providing an alternative way to initiate a call-back procedure between a cellular phone and a communication handling device.